With a potentially large wave of automation coming, the US shouldn't straddled itself with lots of unemployable drivers, farm workers, etc.
I hope we can move to a much more sensible immigration system, similar to Canada's, for example.
Not a sleight, just facts.
13% of unauthorized immigrants have completed college, as compared to 31% of US-born and 30% of authorized immigrants.
[1] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-an-immigrat...
If you don’t believe me, go clean a slaughterhouse one night, or pick strawberries in the hot sun for a day.
Edit: Automate these jobs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-06/crops-rot....
Your choice is not between illegal immigrants and working-class citizens getting that work, it's been illegal immigrants getting the work and nobody doing it.
And it makes sense. We pay for everyone to go to 12 years of public school, learning calculus, history, chemistry, literature, etc.., only to work picking strawberries for the rest of their lives?
Fuck that.
The American labor force isn't designed for these kinds of jobs. I can't imagine any smartphone addicted millennial to do manual labor. In fact, we'd be more honest about our economy if we actually banned these jobs for Americans, and only allowed unskilled immigrants to do them, and deal with it from there.
I provided sources showing that this is, empirically, what happens, no matter what you would like to believe.
> If the pay is right, you will find plenty of people to pick produce.
Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it. That is the fundamental issue here.
I can’t read the second one, but I’ve seen the arguments in the first one a million times — a whole lot of whining about how it’s absolutely impossible to find workers. No, you can’t find them at the price you want. Show me the farmer offering $30/hour plus benefits. You can’t. Even in the first article they peg “skilled” labor at $15-20/hour with the unskilled earning less. Guess what, I can get that a McDonald’s so try harder Mr. Farmer.
> Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it.
So I take it you were against the recent ~doubling of fast food wages in some localities to $15/hour then? Nah, probably not, I’m guessing you used the same argument so many others did: “what’s your problem, it’ll add like three cents to the cost of your Big Mac.” Well, I’d argue that doubling or tripling farm labor costs would only add a dime to the price of a basket of strawberries. Who cares? Pay real wages for real work and stop making excuses for what amounts to modern day slave labor.
Whether people should be willing to may more for their produce, and whether the treatment of these workers is ethically defensible - those are separate questions. I would be totally fine with paying real wages for produce-picking and then subsequently tightening immigration, but there's the paying market we'd like to have and the one we've actually got.
the market will correct itself.
why would anyone want to pick raspberry for $10 an hour when I can get paid more working at in & out. Basically we should support shitty working conditions and black market labor because people dont wanna pay more for their produce?
...and the market of voters will "correct" the elected politicians. Which is why no politician is foolish enough to do this, and they have a monopoly on making laws.
In the long-term, automation may help.
We can also pay a tiny bit more for our strawberries. At retail level, the cost of farm labor is is tiny portion of the total cost.
Crops don't rot on the vine if farmers know the labor situation in advance. Some will decide not to grow that crop. Others will find labor, paying more if required.
Whenever the supply of illegal aliens is reduced, wages rise. The "living wage" can not happen in the presence of illegal aliens. Once wages rise, Americans take the jobs. You can even see this today in the record-low unemployment rates.
I actually agree with this, but society has decided that "food security" is an important component of national security and that the country would like to maintain domestic food production even if it is uneconomical. And that's fine, if that's what the public wants, but once you do that you have to live with the consequences, like being forced to choose between illegal labor and rotting crops.
> In the long-term, automation may help.
Maybe, but a lot of the produce-picking that can be automated already has been. What's left is crops that, for whatever reason, are much harder to automate.
> At retail level, the cost of farm labor is is tiny portion of the total cost.
I'd like to see a source for this.
> Crops don't rot on the vine if farmers know the labor situation in advance
Please actually read my two links. The first is from 2012, and the second is about how the situation persisted through 2016. You're saying four years of Georgia's law wasn't enough advance notice?
Also, I should have said "crops MOSTLY don't rot on the vine" because:
Even if the labor supply is stable, some crops will still be left to rot. The production of the land and the demands of the consumers are both subject to change. This affects the price. Given the current price, some farms may decide to not bother harvesting.
Farms aren't always 100% serious. Lots of them are almost a hobby, or for tax reasons. (if you can claim your home is a farm, you may pay lower property taxes, and there are even income tax advantages)
> Whenever the supply of illegal aliens is reduced, wages rise. The "living wage" can not happen in the presence of illegal aliens. Once wages rise, Americans take the jobs. You can even see this today in the record-low unemployment rates.
So we import our strawberries and wages will rise? How can both of these things be true? And the alternative is we won't eat strawberries anymore?
What you're proposing is setting our country up to be a worse place on the individual level "hey, why can't I find strawberries in my grocery store?" and on the national level, because we'll be beholden to whoever we're importing from.
There's a reason why a country should grow its own food. It's critical for our national security that we not be dependent on outsiders for something so basic.
Whoever told you they're doing this to "Make America Great Again" was lying to you. Not being able to buy strawberries would make America worse.
But that doesn't mean these jobs are in any way desirable.
In another instance, I see people who complain about Amazon's cashierless stores taking away jobs that people could do, but they don't seem to have an answer about how this situation could free those people up to do some other, potentially less menial job.
We do have a mismatch -- lots of employers simply aren't yet paying enough to get employees. And agricultural employers can't get any Americans, white or not white, to work for them, in part because the seasonality of the jobs and lack of health insurance makes the pay immaterial. If you work for 6 weeks you could lose eligibility for some benefits, and what are you going to do for the other 46 weeks in the year? Providing benefits not tied to employment would mitigate this problem. But it still wouldn't solve the problem of all the Americans not even looking for work because they're out on disability. These people, again, are not competing with immigrant labor, because by and large they really can't do any sort of physical labor.
There is really no competition for ag jobs. Americans really, really don't want to do them, for some rational economic reasons and some reasons of expectations/feelings about what they deserve.
That has been the case for a mere 12-18 months out of the last decade.
You know why liberals used to be against allowing vast inflows of unskilled labor? They fully understood the obvious consequences to the workers their party represented, as it pertained to wages & employment prospects. Make that labor more scarce and wages rise. It's the reason Bernie Sanders used to openly advocate against allowing large amounts of unskilled labor immigration.
No other developed nation uses the immigration approach that the US uses. Everyone else favors a merit based system and favors immigrants that can pay for their social benefits. This is why Canada is so annoyed with the US right now on immigrants crossing the border into Canada. [1] A few thousand illegal immigrants cross over each month and Canada is begging the US to make it stop. Out of the entire planet, only the US is held to a different standard, everyone else is allowed to restrict unskilled labor immigration. The US is uniquely backwards in its approach to heavily limiting skilled labor and simultaneously allowing unlimited amounts of unskilled labor.
Where's the international condemnation for Canada's approach to restricting hispanic immigration into their nation? Why are they not called racist for it? They're a mere 1.5% hispanic, specifically because they won't allow unskilled labor from Latin America into the country.
That's an extremely ugly, hypocritical double standard. If the US behaves exactly as Canada does, it's called racist, xenophobic, etc.
I'll note that the sole reason the Republicans are supporting / allowing the low skill immigration approach (and why they've blocked Trump's attempt to shift to a merit system), is that it benefits business margins: they want as much cheap labor as they can get to suppress wages. It's why the Koch brothers are such big proponents of it.
The vast, endless supply of unskilled labor that has flooded the US for decades is partially responsible for low wage growth among lower skilled workers in the US over that time. If there's always more low-skilled labor, wages will not rise for low-skilled laborers. It's basic supply and demand. As automation increasingly hammers low-skill laborers, that effect will get dramatically worse.
The other critical reason why the US is going to be forced to end its immigration policies: you can't support an increasingly generous welfare state matched against vast inflows of unskilled labor that can't pay for its own benefits programs. This is why other developed nations follow a pay-your-way merit system. If you can't support yourself, Canada generally isn't letting you in. A couple million low-skill immigrants coming into their nation would bankrupt their welfare system and collapse their healthcare system. The US welfare state is now more generous than Canada's, so how is the US expected to continue to afford it? You want universal healthcare? You can never have that unless you change the immigration system to restrict inflows of unskilled labor.
The US should flip its policies: continue to allow in some reasonable amount of low-skill labor, and allow in a lot more high-skill labor (which helps pay for the benefits cost of the low-skill labor). As the US moves gradually toward universal healthcare, and continues to increase the generosity of its welfare state, this will become a fiscal necessity, just as it is in all other developed nations and for the exact same reason.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-immigration-border...
The only difference is we can't move all our food factories abroad, so the labor travels here.
But yah, open the borders. That's the only immediate solution.
The 90's had our greatest economic growth, and the borders were basically wide open then.
[0] http://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-shooting-immigrants-ille...
The current US policy by this administration is causing even documented immigrants to reconsider or just give up and leave.
I'm what you would call a (potential) high-skilled immigrant (STEM Phd soon completed at top tier college). Clearly, the current policies don't make me want to stay. The path to permanent residency (i.e. proper immigration) is getting harder and harder.
No longer that two days ago we got an email about "public charges" (i.e. -legal- public help that would make Dhs/State consider us a burden to the US) and how we should be careful not to use those while in the US, otherwise we can get denied entry/visa. Yikes.
Hardly any are undocumented. Of course, for many the documents are forged. Maybe they have your social security number; hope you don't mind! BTW, identity theft is illegal.
Oh, also, in all states and countries an unregistered firearm is not illegal. It is undocumented. If I enter your home without permission, I'm an undocumented resident.
America’s secret superpower is the ability to assimilate pretty much any people within four generations give or take
The Muslims will (continue to) integrate as well. It takes a couple of generations.
Japanese Americans? Chinese Americans? Indian Americans?
Plus, the very concept of some sort of empirical “cultural incompatibility” seems highly questionable. I mean, it’s not like cultures change over time or anything like that.
If any Catholic actually thinks this, they must be deeply ignorant of Catholic theology. According to the Catholic Church, anyone baptised using water and with a Trinitarian formula is Christian. Most Protestant denominations baptise people in this way, so most baptised Protestants are Christians according to traditional Catholic theology.
(And this is not something new introduced with Vatican II either, it historically dates back to the Donatist schism in 4th century North Africa.)
So, from the viewpoint of traditional Catholic theology, Protestants are heretics, but their beliefs about baptism are close enough to the Catholic belief that their heresy doesn't invalidate their baptisms. (Different story for ordination and the eucharist, since Protestant theology on those topics is further away from Catholic theology.) Whereas, non-Trinitarian Christians, the Catholic Church views their beliefs to directly touch on what the sacrament of baptism is about, so their non-Trinitarianism invalidates their baptisms from the Catholic viewpoint.
This is largely an issue of apostolic succession; regardless of the theology of the communities about ordination and the eucharist (which do differ critically), the sacraments cannot be valid because they are valid, in Catholic doctrine, only when performed by a validly ordained bishop (ordination) or consecrated by a validly ordained priest (Eucharist); the absence of episcopal apostolic succession (or, in much of protestantism, even the episcopal office) means that there are no validly ordained bishops and priests around. Now that is intimately tied to the doctrine around ordination, but even if the doctrine around the substance of the sacrament of the eucharist were identical, the absence of a valid minister of the sacrament would be critical.
> Whereas, non-Trinitarian Christians, the Catholic Church views their beliefs to directly touch on what the sacrament of baptism is about, so their non-Trinitarianism invalidates their baptisms from the Catholic viewpoint.
Well, there's two issues there. Sure, it's debatable whether a non-Trinitarian would have the requisite intent to validly (if, necessarily, illicitly) perform a baptism in the eyes of the Catholic Church, but what is more certainly fatal of most baptism by non-Trinitarians would be the failure to baptise using a Trinitarian formula, which is required for the sacrament to be valid, whether or not it is licit.
> This is largely an issue of apostolic succession
There are two different cases here. Protestants differ in their ecclesiology; some retain belief in episcopal apostolic succession, others reject it. Of course, those Protestants who reject episcopal apostolic succession, there are (from the Catholic viewpoint) no valid bishops, and hence no valid priests, and hence no valid Eucharist. On the other hand, the Anglicans, and some (but not all) of the Lutheran churches, claim to have bishops with valid apostolic succession. In the case of the Anglicans, the Catholic Church has decided that their eucharistic theology is so different that their episcopal consecrations and ordinations are invalid as a result (Apostolicae curae, 1896). Presumably, the same judgement would apply to other Protestant denominations claiming episcopal apostolic succession also.
From the doctrinal point of view, there are no non-Catholic Christians, just Catholics of various degrees of imperfection, is and everyone who intends to join Christianity, or to join someone else to it, intends joining to the Catholic Church as the two are identical and coextensive.
[0] it does recognize particular churches, but they are part of rather than separate from the universal Church; in addition to those in full communion with Rome, these include Christian communities who are out of Communion with Rome but who retain valid episcopal apostolic succession, including the various Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches, among others.
> Generally Protestants don't recognize the authority of the church at all (i.e. Sola scriptura).
Sola scriptura is a doctrine of a subset of protestantism; there are Protestants who don't adhere to it but instead to prima scriptura, or to doctrines that aren't clearly either. It is certainly not the case that Protestants as a whole reject ecclesiastical authority.
I'm pretty sure you know about this, but for laymen who may not be familiar with the terminology.
The word "catholic" (little c) literally means "universal". And it is a strong doctrine of the "Catholic church" (big C) that the group of worshipers is singular and universal.
I guess Protestants have a harder time deciding who's a Christian; probably acceptance of the Nicean Creed is a popular standard, though I prefer "anyone who seeks to imitate Christ".
Rome absolutely accepts them as Christians.
It views them as wrong, but it does that for plenty of Christians that don't completely reject it's authority, too.
> The central point of Lutheran Protestantism is that it's open source: anybody with a Bible can decide for themselves how to implement it without asking for permission.
It would seem to me that the central point of Lutheran Protestantism is that there is a right way to implement Christianity, that right way is clear in Scripture, and having intermediaries between the believer and the Scripture is a barrier to the believer finding the truth in Scripture.
Lutheranism also seems generally pretty strongly defined by a particular opinion on what the right answers are, or at least a wide range of them, though somewhat internally divided by the degree of certainty ascribed to those answers.
Also I think you are right that many Protestants believe their opinions are clearly implicated by scripture, but it should be obvious on reflection that Scripture is not self-interpreting.
Strictly speaking, there is a distinction between "sponsor" and "witness". The sponsor must be a Catholic, the witnesses can be non-Catholic Christians. However, in my personal experience (having had one child baptised Catholic, and the other will be baptised soon), everyone just collectively treats the "sponsor" and "witnesses" as "godparents". The parish just tells people "one godparent must be a Catholic". The sponsor is just the first godparent listed on the baptism certificate.
As far as parents go, technically there is no requirement that either parent be Catholic, or even Christian. A Buddhist couple could ask for their child to be baptised as Catholic. Now, in practice, priests will be extremely hesitant about fulfilling such a request, but strictly speaking it is allowed.
One Catholic parent is the usual heuristic but it isn't actually the rule so isn't absolutely binding. For example, if a non-Catholic is known to regularly attend Catholic services, but for whatever reason is hesitating in formally converting, a priest may very well agree to such a parent's request to baptise their child.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, is religion.
Lets cut through the code words then and have a direct counterexample to what you're trying to say.
Nigerians are primarily Muslims. They are also highly educated and among the most entrepreneurial immigrants to the USA. And while there's a "Nigerian prince" joke every now and then, they really are doing relatively well in the USA. Like, "better than Asians" with regards to college education statistics.
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-m...
Nigerians are basically the perfect counterexample to the "Religion" (aka: Islam) problem that is so often brought up. High rates of college completion, high rates of business / entrepreneurs, high-rates of integration. Overall, clearly net-positive to the USA.
> Other Asian immigrants in the US were also either not religious, or (like with Koreans and Filipinos) adopted the same religion as the dominant culture.
What about Indians? Who are usually either Hindu or Muslim? Indians are also highly educated and start a large number of businesses.
I'm personally Catholic. I'd obviously prefer it if immigrants would come with the same Religion as me, but the statistics are in. Nigerians, Indians, and a whole host of other immigrants kind of do perfectly fine in America. There's no need for them to be Christian or otherwise "mainstream".
Indeed, bringing in immigrants on the basis of religion is severely anti-American IMO. America is certainly big enough to sustain Hindu, Muslims, and other religious groups. Especially if those people are coming in highly-skilled, highly educated, and overall are a benefit to our society.
So maybe it is religion, just not the whole religion, but rather particular sects. All Christians are not like the Pentecostals or the Mormons, and similarly all Muslims are not the same.
The sect of Osama Bin Laden was "Wahhabism", which is relatively rare outside of Saudi Arabia. And even then, the Saudi Princes who work with the USA are often pro-Wahabbism, so the USA can't even deride that sect (even if its the primary sect of Al-Qaeda). Because there's still "good guys" who follow that particular sect.
Note that the "Bin Laden" family was a very rich and entrepreneurial group of people. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Laden_family) Some of them were huge investors in the US before their "black sheep" messed up their family name forever.
The Middle East is complicated. Like, super super complicated. Honestly, the bin Ladens in general (aside from the infamous one) should be welcome to the USA. A bit unfortunate about their "black sheep" sibling.
-----------
Besides, if "Religion" was the problem, why did the USA DESTROY the only secular, maybe even atheist, group in the Middle East? (aka: Iraq Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athists).
Reason: the world is complicated. And thinking about it in terms of Religion only is a mistake. ISIS for example is a combination of yes, Wahhabism, but ALSO has the support of former Ba'athists.
And the Ba'athists believe in Secularism and secular law. They seemed to have joined in the ISIS fun not because of religious reasons, but because they wished to take over Iraq and saw aligning themselves with the fundamentalist Wahhabists as the best path forward and creating a unified Arab State.
So yes, we are fighting secular (arguably an atheist) groups in the Middle East. The world is a very complicated place. Yes, we have enemies some places, but Muslims exist across the entire world. You can't paint the issues of one region as a blight on all Muslims.
Even then: I'd imagine that we should welcome the many Iraqis who have helped the USA and are now getting targetted by ISIS in their country. We have friends in the region and we are turning them away with our immigration policies. We've turned our back on our closest supporters of that region, and I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of them have died because of their pro-US support or actions.
TL;DR: Immigration policy is hard.
Nigeria is split close to 50-50 between Muslims and Christians. The north is majority Muslim, the south is majority Christian.
More like 50%/50%
> What about Indians? Who are usually either Hindu or Muslim?
Most are Hindu or Sikh
Oh right, Pakistan is where the Muslims come from. Apologies, its sometimes hard to remember everything about the world.
But yeah, neither of those are Christian. Both are IIRC Polythistic religions, about as different from Christianity as possible. Muslims for example believe in Abraham and the existence of Jesus. Their story is... very different but Allah is clearly the God of Abraham / Yahweh.
So if anything, Muslims are "closer" to the mainstream religion of the USA than Hindu's or Sikhs
Many Hindus believe that the numerous deities are different forms or aspects of one ultimate deity. As such, they are much closer to monotheism than you think. It can be described as "inclusive monotheism", as opposed to the "exclusive monotheism" of the Abrahamic religions.
Sikhism is not polytheistic at all, it is very monotheistic.
Christianity itself has been accused of polytheism. Many Jews, Muslims, and non-Trinitarian Christians argue that there is no real difference between Trinity and tritheism. Many Protestants accuse the Catholic and Orthodox cult of Mary and the Saints of bordering on polytheism. Mormonism (admittedly on the fringe of Christianity) sees the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three separate "beings", although it redefines the word "God" to refer to those three beings collectively. Mormon theology also implies that God the Father has a wife (the Heavenly Mother), and of other gods ruling over other universes (or parts of the universe.)
Of course, part of this could just be physical proximity: these warring groups tend to be neighbors or even in the same places, causing friction. But, for now at least, we have lots of Indians (Sikhs and Hindus) here in the US and don't have the problems with them that we do with others.
This seems to be more true of mutually exclusive religions that are historically geographically close together for an extended period of time than ones which happen merely to be doctrinally similar, and to be more (but certainly not exclusively) true of political conflicts between religious communities rather than theological conflicts.
> But, for now at least, we have lots of Indians (Sikhs and Hindus) here in the US and don't have the problems with them that we do with others
Part of that is because the people who would have problems are still mistaking South Asians with Middle Easterners and also (whether or not they do that) assuming they are Muslim. Give it some time, they’ll get their own targeted hate. (Hinduism already gets some through the Christian anti-yoga movement.)
You mean like European Christian colonizers and the indigenous peoples of North and South America?
They shared neither language nor religion (US was overwhelmingly protestant). At the time, they were considered a distinct race from your typical white American due to their Sicilian heritage. Their diet was also significantly different, to the point where some states actually sent out social workers teaching Italian families to cook "American" foods -- the fear being their pasta-heavy diets would prevent them from integrating. Politically, they were far more pro-labor and were viewed as agitators, socialists and anarchists -- far removed from the political mainstream during the roaring 20s. They were hated and feared enough that there was a mass lynching of 11 Italian-Americans in Louisiana.
Seriously, though, Catholics and Protestants? There was a reason it was a big deal that Kennedy was the first Catholic president.
And that was the secularized, polite face of the common religious belief that both the Papacy as an office and the particular occupants of that office were the literal referent of the biblical Antichrist, and that “Papists” were, therefore, followers of the Antichrist.
And do you agree with the observers? If so, do you have sources to back up the claim? I ask you not to accuse you of anything but because I watched a Kurzgesagt video a while back saying most of the immigrants have integrated well over the next few generations.
It just takes time to integrate, and I'd say those who argue that Europe isn't integrated are looking st more recent immigrants, or older generations, and not the ones who would most likely be integrated already.
We have a decent immigration system in terms of getting the right kinds of advanced folks.
The problem is we are also unwilling to do what needs to be done to stem the tide of unskilled illegal labor that flows into the nation.
Who will pick strawberries? Who will clean your hotel room? Etc.
It's the classic who will do "X" dirty job argument.
All you're doing by continuing the exploitation is keeping such automation from being developed, as you rob it of it's market.
It is so predictable that the whole "but what about the farmers" is touted as a reason to flaunt immigration laws. The farmers are not owed such a subsidy by the American people. They will adapt if they are forced to. They would be stupid to do so before they are forced to.
Sure, and who cares about the people who can't afford food in the meantime while we wait for the new Eli Whitney? You are proposing fixing one problem by creating numerous more problems.
You also shouldn't treat poor people as a single group. Yes, some poor people will be receiving these higher wages but no all. There are still people lost in the transition just like there would be people lost in the transition waiting for innovation from Eli Whitney.
Let's frame this a different way...
"Who will actually spend the money to develop a strawberry picking machine when there are piles of people that are willing to do it for below minimum wage and no health care?"
Having some group you use at near slave labor status can hold back technological innovation.
There is a seasonal / migrant worker visa for this reason. For instance, near me, Kiawah Island's resorts are partly staffed with Jamaican guest workers because the seasonal nature of the job. In high school I worked as a bagger at a grocery store on another island that was incredibly seasonal, so we had Russian guest workers during the summers.
Some jobs probably just wouldn't get done without either A) a wage increase or B) guest workers, e.g. particularly brutal agricultural tasks. We can allow the necessary workforce in for these tasks if need be.
> It's the classic who will do "X" dirty job argument.
The poor.
Having grown up in an area with a large Hispanic influx, they did. I currently live in an area with little to no Hispanics, but we do have a lot of poor African-Americans. They do the jobs I grew up seeing Central and South Americans work.
The problem with the illegal influx from southern nations, is they can also crowd out native blue collar markets by working for less, and are willing to live an impoverished standard of living. We should not be forsaking our own countrymen so we can get cheap lawn care from a wage-slave underclass living in third-world conditions on American soil.
The poor here just aren't willing to do that work at that price. The supermarkets aren't willing to pay more for the produce. Something has to give and in both countries I'm sure it's going to be the rules on visas.
1859: But who will pick cotton? Perform household chores?
We will either develop a technological solution or gasp the wages and benefits for picking strawberries will rise to such a point that it makes sense to pick that up as a career choice.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-21/the-myth-...
The biggest reason for that IMO is because Mexico has been doing relatively well over the past couple of decades. You don't attempt a very risky illegal crossing if you can get a job and support your family where you are.
The repeal of NAFTA will restart the immigration wave as the Mexican economy tanks.
Though I would add that doing it via a more realistic temporary work visa program would be preferable to encouraging an illegal crossing industry to flourish.
You're not at all wrong, I grew up with a lot of illegal friends. Good number of them have since gone on to become American citizens through hard work and determination and have built good lives for themselves.
Maternally, I'm a second generation American. My grandparents came to America post-WWII with nothing but an offer of employment, and ended up retired with the classic condo beach life. The classic story of rags to middle class American riches. There's a reason that's been the American tale, coming to a faraway land in search of prosperity takes drive. We filter for hard workers.
The problem is the black-market / underbelly aspects of this pool, and that very desperation and drive that drove them here has them put up with conditions we should be ashamed of be it in California, Iowa, or Appalachia. Businesses exploiting that cheap source of labor drive down the ability for those trying to live a basic American life.
California has never been "straddled" with unemployable farm workers over winter...
Your argument is that the jobs these people do might be automated away so they shouldn't come here. Is that correct?
I would counter that many of these jobs can't easily be automated and that these workers are much more adaptable than you give them credit for. You just aren't going to see robots picking strawberries or hanging sheetrock on a large scale anytime soon for economic and technical reasons. Delivery drivers and dishwashers have very low cpaex vs robots that could do the same. These immigrants also start small companies at higher rates than native born Americans.
I guess I just don't get the rationale for keeping out low skill workers. The pay for goods an services, provide labor, start businesses, and generally do quite well.
Each definition changes the answers significantly, I'd think.
YMMV